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10 Works 185 Membros 5 Críticas

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Includes the name: Ron Formisano

Obras por Ronald P. Formisano

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Conhecimento Comum

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male

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Críticas

A permanent political class has emerged on a scale unprecedented in our nation 's history. Its self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption contribute to rising inequality. Its reach extends from the governing elite throughout nongovernmental institutions. Aside from constituting an oligarchy of prestige and power, it enables the creation of an aristocracy of massive inherited wealth that is accumulating immense political power. In a muckraking tour de force reminiscent of Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and C. Wright Mills, American Oligarchy demonstrates the way the corrupt culture of the permanent political class extends down to the state and local level. Ron Formisano breaks down the ways this class creates economic inequality and how its own endemic corruption infects our entire society. Formisano delves into the work of not just politicians but lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, celebrity journalists, behind-the-scenes billionaires, and others. Their shameless pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, often at taxpayer expense, rewards channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites. That inequality in turn has choked off social mobility and made a joke of meritocracy. As Formisano shows, these forces respond to the oligarchy 's power and compete to bask in the presence of the .01 percent. They also exacerbate the dangerous instability of an American democracy divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
aitastaes | Dec 31, 2020 |
A brilliantly written, scathing insight into America's ruling class - politicians. The book Americans need right now, one that could open the eyes to many who blindly believe that politicians even at the lowest levels have anyone's interests but their own at heart. Corruption permeates the system, and only a total overhaul can fix it.
 
Assinalado
LilyRoseShadowlyn | 2 outras críticas | May 2, 2019 |
This cri de coeur about corruption has a lot of outrage, but it’s short on definitions and thus on solutions. At times, Formisano suggests that anyone with a state, local, or federal government job is part of the oligarchy, as well as doctors, people in positions of authority at nonprofits, think tanks, and businesses. There is a lot of corruption in the US; the chapter about the abuses in Kentucky, where poverty, pollution, child mortality, and other indicators of suffering are extremely high, should make anyone angry. I understand getting mad at nonprofit CEOs who are compensated like for-profit CEOs—but the problem is not the parity (I don’t like the argument that “you chose a helping profession, you should accept less pay because of how good it feels to do good”; not only is it a trope usually used to justify paying female-dominated professions less, it positions doing good as something you ought to have to pay for, when really you ought to have to pay for acting solely in your own self-interest) but the fact that anybody can get paid as much as for-profit CEOs do, with so little tax. It is appalling that CEOs of nonprofit hospitals are paid hundreds of millions while the hospitals garnish the wages of poor patients who can’t pay—but that is true of for-profit hospitals too.

Formisano also points out that our federal legislators get perks that let them live like millionaires even when (as is increasingly unlikely) they aren’t; during the 2013 government shutdown, Congresspeople stopped National Airport from closing because it served them and also deemed their own gyms and pools “essential” enough to stay open, though the workers there still didn’t make very much. These privileges, he suggests, corrupt even the people who moved up in class, so that a visionary leader at Brown University speaks eloquently about admitting more students from poor backgrounds but also doesn’t want to interfere with alumni preferences because she has a granddaughter. The elites funnel money to themselves and their families by self-dealing, whether in government (remember Kim Davis?), nonprofits, or business. Disgrace, if exposure occurs, is ameliorated by a soft landing—a pension, positions on other boards, and soft words from one’s co-elites. Even nonprofits are in on the game, and they increasingly replace grassroots activism with palatable-to-elites causes that are organized from the top.

Formisano quotes Robert Borosage’s criticism of liberal focus on “opportunity” instead of equity or punishment for elite cheaters as “passive voice populism,” to good effect. Defunding tax collection is just another mechanism of harm—creating more loopholes for cheaters, who are subsidized by ordinary wage workers whose taxes are collected automatically. Though it’s relatively easy to cherry-pick from history, this John Adams quote seemed apposite: “civil, military, political and hierarchical Despotism, have all grown out of the natural Aristocracy of ‘Virtue and Talents.’ We, to be sure, are far remote from this. Many hundred years must roll away before We shall be corrupted.”
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
rivkat | 2 outras críticas | Aug 17, 2017 |
Tales from the swamp

We all know it, but the details are still stomach-churning. American Oligarchy relates how the Ruling Class operates. It is focused mainly on government, where electeds vote themselves perks like free cars, multiple no-obligation airline reservations (first class), and free global junkets for friends and family on 16 planes maintained by the Air Force for their private use. It allows them to hire friends and family on taxpayer money, and earmark cash grants for favored businesses. They spend half their time raising money for their next election, and the rest accepting gifts, dinners and more junkets from lobbyists, while steadfastly maintaining it has no effect on their positions. They live high off the perks, high off the PAC money, high off the lobbies, and eventually become millionaires themselves (Half of them are at any given time). The system is way out of whack.

Formisano says the United States is headed beyond oligarchy to an aristocracy of inherited wealth, as the ruling class joins the business aristocracy in stashing wealth for its progeny. Nepotism is plainly visible right on television, as networks compete to hire the children of the ruling class right out of school.

Our so-called market economy is becoming a market society, where the wealthy can cut in line. A classic example is paying for a high-occupancy-vehicle “permit” even though you always drive alone. America is corrupt, through and through. Americans look at the bribery that goes on elsewhere and shudder. But it is the way of life in American government, and everyone on all sides is there to get rich first and above all. The middle class and the poor only count on election day when they all suddenly become populists.

As Formisano points out, this sort of rot is absolutely typical of a country in its late stages. It is a sign of the end.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In France, the very first thing newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron did was introduce a law banning the hiring of family by electeds, banning earmark slush funds, banning the holding of more than one elected post, and imposing term limits. In the USA, the first thing the new Congress did after the election of Donald Trump was to close down the Ethics Office.

There is a special chapter on Kentucky and its particular flavor of corruption, theft and high living by civil servants and executives among the legions of poor. Formisano is in Kentucky, so this whipping child of a state is personally known to him. It is revolting how NGOs and civil servants constantly seek to monetize their positions out of taxpayer dollars, and it is rampant. And don’t think for a moment this is unique to Kentucky. In The Poverty Industry, Daniel Hatcher points out that New Hampshire fairly brags that 40% of the state budget is taken from Medicaid funds meant for the poor. How much more institutionalized can corruption be?

Formisano’s pace is fast and steady. He is unrelenting. You get the impression he could just as easily have made the book 900 pages. It is very readable, very accessible, and strangely numbing. After a while, you begin thinking this is ingrained, a structural feature of the republic. I think he noticed this, because there is an Afterword where he points to how we have gotten past nodes like this before. From his pen to God’s ear.

David Wineberg
… (mais)
1 vote
Assinalado
DavidWineberg | 2 outras críticas | Jun 7, 2017 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
10
Membros
185
Popularidade
#117,260
Avaliação
3.2
Críticas
5
ISBN
28

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